“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Sorry for the light posting......I have a good reason

So I should probably explain the dearth of posting over the holidays. It started with a weird medical day back on the 26th. I spent about 7 hours at an American Family Care to be seen about the unexplained swelling of my right calf and the low-grade fever that seemed to accompany it.(The resident clinic at UAB where I always go, had no appointments until like mid January.)When they finally got back with the blood tests, my d-dimer level was elevated.....this is indicative of a possible blood clot. OK so the doctor delivering this news seemed a tad panicked and therefore so was I, because while other things can cause d-dimer to be elevated, none of them can kill you in the next 30 seconds.Apparently "possible blood clot" triggers an automatic trip to the ER in order to rule that out first, and I felt lucky that I was able to convince him to let Dianne drive me there and not call an ambulance.UAB did the ultrasound to test for clots and thankfully they came back completely negative, which left unexplained cellulitis as the cause of the swelling and fever. After a Vancomycin IV we were discharged from the ER at like 10:30.In all the madness, I had forgotten to eat and realized I hadn't since 7:00 breakfast. Thankfully Wendy's is open 'till 1:00 and that Double with fries went down nicely.It was a crap day to have spent it like that, but finding out I didn't have a blood clot was a relief.So I guess you'll still have ol' Ed to kick around for the foreseeable future. Any way, I haven't felt much like writing since I've been sitting on the couch with my leg elevated watching movies and plowing through season 3 of Breaking Bad on Netflix for the past few days. I feel much better now and should be back tomorrow complaining about the government, full-time.